The Blackening’s big twist is just being kind to its horror-movie victims

polygon.com:

The Blackening, Tim Story’s horror-comedy about a group of Black friends on a weekend getaway at an ill-fated cabin in the woods, feels like a test case for a bunch of different experiments. Released digitally only weeks after it landed in theaters, it became the latest recent film where the rental release and box-office take were in direct competition. It’s also an unusual balancing act between snark and substance; while the comedy is broad and often highly self-aware, the script just as often slips in sincere points about race relations, Black culture, and particularly Black friendship.

But above all, it feels like Story and co-writers Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins used the movie to experiment with how far they could push the structure of a typical horror scenario and still keep an audience on board. In the process, they do something daring for a studio genre movie. In retrospect, it feels absolutely necessary for the kind of story they’re telling, and for the specific balance they’re aiming for between humor and horror. It’s certainly a subversive way of approaching a slasher movie.

But as the movie is unfolding, their approach becomes more unsettling than the horror-movie tropes themselves, because the story is so unconventional.The Blackening goes somewhere horror movies normally just don’t go.

[Ed. note: End spoilers ahead for The Blackening.]

The movie’s premise has eight friends reuniting for the first time since college, for a Juneteenth getaway at a remote rural cabin. There are a few tensions in the group: Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) is once again dating Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), who repeatedly cheated on her during their years of on-and-off dating. Knowing her flamboyant gay best friend Dewayne (Dewayne